Bill pay solutions for businesses: Save time, manage costs, and get ahead

Outside of payroll, bill payments are often a company’s biggest spending category. Goods and services spending can account for 70% of spend. And 80% of chief procurement officers list cost reduction as a top priority.

Yet businesses often lack visibility into how vendor payments impact cash flow. And if you’re manually paying bills to a growing rolodex of different vendors, you run the risk of inputting the wrong payment information, missing an invoice due date because you’re stuck in approval purgatory, and losing countless hours reconciling transactions to make sure the books tie out.

The good news? Bill pay software can ease your burden. Read on to learn more about how it can help businesses streamline the vendor payment experience and save valuable time, and manage spend.

What is bill pay software?

Instead of manually processing every invoice from every vendor across every department, companies can use software to manage, track, and yes, pay all their bills from a single platform. With these solutions, you can automatically make swift, accurate payments to every biller.

Benefits of bill payment solutions

Automated bill pay systems save time, spare stress, and help finance teams manage costs. Here’s a look at the biggest perks in more detail. 

Reduce manual work

Manual bill management can be fraught with slow payment processing times and costly errors. Software paves the way for automations that save hours of administrative work. The best solutions, for instance, let you instantly create bills by uploading invoices into the platform, automatically capturing bill details like the due date, amount, vendor name, and billing address—so teams spend less time inputting (and double-checking) data. 

Schedule digital payments from different accounts

With bill pay software, you can tee up transactions and choose your preferred bank accounts and payment options—like ACH, wires, or checks—for every vendor. This way, teams can ensure payment methods can reliably process punctual, accurate payments. 

Customize approval workflows

Instead of scrambling in search of the right team members to sign off on invoices, standout bill pay solutions automatically route bills for approval. And if you’re in the market for a new bill pay platform, look for service providers that make this approval process limitlessly customizable.

Rippling Bill Pay, for instance, has a configurable policy engine that triggers approval notifications to different employees for review based on an invoice’s amount, vendor, and more. Approvers can use the workflow to sort bills according to their due date, days past due, and pending approval. 

Sync transactions to your general ledger

Bill pay software can also help finance teams close their books out faster by automatically syncing vendor transactions to their general ledger. You can spare yourself the administrative hassle of logging and reconciling every vendor payment by using a platform that has API integrations with your accounting software and auto-categorizes vendors with the right GL codes, ensuring you always have up-to-date records of bill payments. 

Pay vendors from around the world

Global companies can hit snags paying international vendors in different currencies. But premium bill pay solutions let you pay vendors (and contractors) around the world in local currency, without finance teams worrying about cumbersome conversions.

Simplify vendor management

Bill pay solutions let you consolidate all your invoices into one secure portal. Not only does this boost your operational efficiency; it can also improve your relationships with vendors. Suppliers can use their end of the platform to update billing information, upload tax details, and set other specifications that help you pay them promptly. And businesses can rest easy avoiding late fees, and maybe even snag payment discounts from vendors because of good customer satisfaction. 

Choosing the right solution for your business

When weighing your options for bill pay software, growth-minded small businesses should keep an eye out for systems that’ll support them as they scale. And larger, global companies ought to seek platforms with international capabilities, like paying in different currencies. You’ll also want a top-notch user experience, competitive pricing, and an expansive repertoire of time-saving automations. 

Rippling checks all these boxes—and many more. Not only does Rippling Bill Pay automatically create bills, send them out for approval, and allow companies to schedule payments; it also integrates with Rippling Spend, which unifies all your company’s finances—bill payments alongside expense management, corporate cards, and even payroll—into one consolidated platform. The result: full-scale control of your company spend that streamlines your business operations and frees finance teams from monotonous busy work. 

What’s more, Rippling uses employee data as the single source of truth that connects all workforce management systems under the same ecosystem. While finance, HR, and IT processes tend to be siloed, Rippling makes them interoperable, letting you assign set-and-forget automations that work across different functions. 

For instance, Rippling can take data from onboarding to automatically assign new employees a corporate card spending limit, maximum reimbursement amount, and pre-configured laptop. And if they need to pay a vendor bill, Rippling knows who to notify for approval.

FAQs

What is bill pay software?

Bill pay software is an online fintech platform that allows businesses to create, review, and schedule payments for bills. These solutions also make it easier to pay from different accounts and record transactions for accounting purposes. 

How can companies automatically pay bills?

Companies can use bill pay software to set up automatic payments for recurring bills and schedule payments for specified dates. You can also input different payment options and choose how you’d like to send payment. 

Which bill pay solution is best?

While the right bill pay solution depends on the unique needs of your company, standout options come with time-saving workflow automations and integrations with other finance tools in your tech stack. Rippling, for instance, offers a single solution for bill pay, corporate cards, expense management, and payroll—in addition to a full suite of HR and IT products. 

Disclaimer: Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.